According to planning expert Christopher Leinberger in The Option of Urbanism: Investing in a New Urban Dream, nineteen standard real estate products (Wall Street does not even call them buildings) constitute most of the built environment. This private construction market comprises 78% of annual capital expenditures on buildings,⁴ of which the nineteen commodity building sectors are the majority subset. These nineteen building categories are the de facto building blocks of our metropolitan areas – including suburban offices, fast food restaurants, metal warehouses, big box grocers, garden apartments, single-family houses, hotels, self-storage facilities, assisted living facilities, neighborhood shopping centers, etc. (Fig. 1).

CLT is a twenty-five-year-old technology developed in Europe and gradually gaining acceptance in North America, but for now only among elite clientele. Timber is easily machinable given its light weight and ease in splicing, lamination, and assembly that support CNC-based prefabrication processes.⁶ Factory-based mass timber construction premised on the lamination of wood members in the form of wall and roof panels, structural beams and columns, or whole building units has become cost competitive with concrete and steel systems. Unlike dimensional wood used for  light-weight framing, laminate manufacturing leverages timber sourced from low-grade trees to high-performance high-quality structural and cladding building components (Fig. 3). 

Innovations in timber-engineered buildings to date in the US have been associated with signature projects involving tall buildings and institutional structures like the T3 office building in Minneapolis by Michael Green Architecture and the DLR Group, the Adohi Hall dormitory at the University of Arkansas by Leers Weinzapfel Associates and Modus Studio, and the Common Ground High School in New Haven, Connecticut by Gray Organschi Architects. However, the ordinary low-rise building types comprising America’s auto-oriented landscapes hold the key to revolutionizing the nation’s carbon footprint through better building, urbanism, and land use at scale. Wood City introduces mass timber technology into the development value chain where many of these ordinary building sectors are already undergoing novel mixings of space, services, technologies, and experiences. The real estate development value chain is being recast in sectors like fuel retail, fast food, grocery, and warehousing, while new interest from venture-capital is hybridizing sectors in housing, hospitality, healthcare, and the senior services markets in value-adding ways. Anticipating new flexible building platforms like co-living, logistics facilities with public or “third place” spaces, free-standing restaurants that become food halls, strip shopping centers as community hubs, and the office-as-garden, Wood City proposes a new architecture of the ordinary rooted in a regenerative material system. 

Real estate represents 35% of the US economy with housing constituting 56% of the built environment, non-residential 28% of the built environment, and infrastructure 16% of the built environment.⁹ The Urban Land Institute’s (ULI) annual status report on real estate, Emerging Trends in Real Estate 2020, chronicles ongoing sector disruptions in logistics/storage, manufactured housing, shopping centers, multifamily housing, and senior assisted living. Notably, rising investor interest in the ESG movement, renewable energy, and fleet electrification are changing building landscapes and promising to reset future risk assessment, capital deployment, and community relationships. ESG will be a primary forcing function compelling shifts to circular resource economies in construction.¹⁰ 

Aside from realignments in technology and development, one of the more impactful disruptors in real estate are the capital markets themselves. An abundance of idle debt and equity capital – by many estimates well over one trillion dollars – is seeking long-term returns in venture-driven investment associated with new kinds of real estate products.¹¹ Notwithstanding the obstinance of an inefficient building industry to change, innovation is now crucial in “bending the cost curve” to counter real estate development cost escalations that continually outpace inflation. A growing number of investors including retirement funds are privileging “patient capital” models over short-term liquidity needs; a shift in benchmarking which bodes well for the intersection of wood-based prefabrication with other trends. These market resets are powerful and constitute what the ULI calls the “the real estate of the future.” ¹²

Unlike mid-rise buildings, garden apartments are compatible with suburban codes and faster to build. Such a convergence of challenges has already nudged some housing production to prefabrication. 

Meanwhile, cities are relaxing municipal codes to permit again the development of accessory dwelling units (ADUs) on parcels zoned for single-family residences.¹⁶ Ranging from 150 to 800 sq. ft. [14 to 74 m²] these self-contained residential units can be attached to the primary residence, sit atop a garage, or stand alone as a cottage in the backyard (Fig. 5).

A positive real estate trend involves the incorporation of community values into building sector development from offices to retail and housing, exemplified in the burgeoning popularity of co-living and co-working developments. Impacts of the sharing and gig economies are becoming apparent in property development, particularly in the tenant office sector where networking and socializing have become essential aspects of work ¹⁷ (Fig. 6).

Capitalizing on the co-working model, hotels are selling memberships to fulfill demand for high-amenity work environments that promote wellness, even discounting room rates. Like the office sector, consumers are favoring hospitality environments with ESG business models and branding that communicate these values shifts. Ample research shows that wellness and biophilic design in work environments through incorporation of natural materials like wood (given its visual and thermal effusivity or warmth), landscapes, and natural light, directly affect enterprise productivity according to a keynote industry report “Human Space: The Global Impact of Biophilic Design in the Workplace” (2015) – the move to quality will lead to greater selectivity among office sector tenants post-COVID-19 as one-third of office workers before the pandemic indicated that office design would impact their decision to join a company.¹⁹  

As well, demand for climate-controlled self-storage units is growing as high-value goods including vehicles, art, and commercial stock for businesses require conditioned storage (Fig. 9).

Even once “category killer” big-box grocers that eschewed stores for warehouses, are integrating fulfillment strategies, experience economies, and educational outreach into the warehouse, creating destination experiences (Fig. 10). 

One-sixth of the American population eats at a fast food restaurant every day. Known as Quick Service Restaurants (QSR), fast casual and fast food restaurants account for 50% of total sales in the restaurant sector.²⁴ QSRs are constantly morphing their menus in response to changing consumer demand for healthier more diversified food options with local fresh food sourcing. The more competitive franchises are improving the social experience while limiting costly expenditures on indoor dining environments. Too, the QSR landscape is expanding services related to catering, event making, and delivery, while co-locating within larger stores or food halls and malls challenging the dominance of standalone fast food franchises. Just as regionalization changes menus, hybridizations of fast food and fast casual coupled with new experience economies in ever more densifying and vitalizing suburban environments will change the sector’s building and urban formats (Fig. 12).

In its discussion of senior needs as they pertain to real estate the ULI report observes, “senior housing is increasingly recognized as a critical part of the solution for population health management and health care cost containment – a growing social, economic, and political reality. Indeed, facility operators including those for outpatient and multi-specialized medical offices are creating their own managed Medicare organizations” ²⁶ as capital vertically integrates building markets for the aging that look more like hospitality environments (Fig. 15).

Wood City then takes up Keller Easterling’s challenge in Medium Design: Knowing How to Work on the World, to move beyond the project to engage matrices and ecosystems and their interdependent indices through “protocols of interplay, not things, but rather parameters for how things interact with each other.” ²⁷ Work on wicked problems entails more the articulation of an ecosystem vocabulary as well as “medium thinking” beyond solutionist thinking. Materiality has a central role in shaping the urban once we stop parsing information in the topographic arts and work with the interconnectivity of co-existent technologies in fabrication, building types, logistics protocols, and geographic/territorial formations, rather than treat them only as successive specializations. 

Even markets that once viewed buildings as simply products, are beginning to see the potential of buildings as services platforms, which will likely include monetizing the environmental consequences of the very building components themselves. Less “smart building” in its overemphasis on sensors and data in constructing feedback, and more a metabolic consciousness concerned with circular macro-economies that intwine cultivation, extraction, fabrication, use, disassembly, and reuse in solving for multiple challenges and opportunities simultaneously. Indeed, design culture’s underlying social imperative now demands vocabularies structured around “coupled human and natural systems” known as CHANS. We can grow regenerative forests and cities alike: a point roundly made by architects pioneering connections among mass timber construction, urbanism, and forestry.²⁸ Just imagine a future where basic biophilic qualities are encoded into our commercial landscapes.

Regenerative design requires regenerative economics. But can design nudge policy toward the development of circular resource economies? Policy could incent markets to connect sustainable forestry management practices in sourcing wood as a reliable feedstock with building markets and prefabrication operations scaled and staged for timber. Tree thinning is desperately needed in America’s undermanaged and overgrown forests—the fourth largest forest area in the world at over 310 million ha.²⁹ Tree thinning for instance, strengthens nutrient cycling and optimizes other ecosystem services within forests, including fuel reduction to reduce the risk of catastrophic fire or “disturbance regulation”. Restorative thinning costs can be countered through revenue gained from the sale of low-grade trees as new feedstocks for mass timber buildings, since forest managers across the US need to find markets for one billion cubic feet of wood per year.³⁰ There is abundant supply just from thinning, though its operational scale and labor intensiveness would mostly serve regional supply chains. The wood from forest thinning alone is more than enough to supply the nation’s annual count of single-family housing starts. Foresters understand that markets for wood create healthier forests. 

Wood is a carbon pool, capable of transferring the forest’s stored carbon into buildings. But not all forests and trees are the same. The amount of carbon stored in forests and trees – an important distinction – is constantly changing. Policy based on carbon accounting will require greater research triangulating the ecosystem status of forests, tree species condition, and their actual carbon sequestration capacities. Life cycle assessments (LCAs) begin at extraction and thus do not account for actual carbon flows since embodied carbon varies with the condition of the forest based on its type (i.e., tropical, temperate, boreal), soil health, decomposition rates of biomaterials, and disturbance regimes (e.g., insects, disease, fire, etc.). For example, tropical forests store two-thirds more carbon in their biomass than other forest types where 69% of their sunk carbon is stored in the soil.³¹

Old forests accumulate more carbon than young forests, but the latter’s higher growth rates remove more carbon from the atmosphere. While the amount of carbon stored in a tree (approximately half of tree’s dry weight) depends on its size, age, and species, older trees generally store more carbon through their mature leaf canopies. Though older trees are less efficient processors of carbon than younger trees, “if a tree’s diameter grows ten times as large, it will undergo a hundredfold increase in leaf mass and a fiftyfold to one hundredfold increase in total leaf area. This outweighs the lower rate of productivity” according to a comprehensive study of carbon flux in forests.³² Sourcing practices legitimizing new urban material economies of mass timber, then, will have to depend on more information-laden representations of carbon flows across the several scales of biological organization governing the pulsing cycles of forests.

However, LCAs that account for the bio-geophysical space of forests is complicated by the various ways in which wood is harvested, traded, processed, and consumed in worldwide commodity supply chains, which are now essentially corporate black boxes. No matter how remote a forest, wood is a global resource subject to the political economy of timber and its shifts from intraregional to international trade. Low costs drive exchange in established commodity markets often leading to upside down outcomes. For instance, the US is the world’s seventh largest exporter of softwood lumber yet imports over 30% of its annual softwood lumber consumption.³³ In their excellent chronicle of timber markets, Timber, Peter Dauvergne and Jane Lister explain the secular market shift from sourcing once dominated by forests and wood companies of the North – vertically integrated around the mill – to a few vertically integrated multinational discount retailers that primarily source wood from industrialized rapid-growth tropical tree plantations of the South.³⁴ The next economic reset of the timber market is certain yet unpredictable since catalysts for “new work” in its fresh objectives and relationships do not flow from the old work – a persistent theme in Jane Jacobs’ writings on economic behavior. But given three new imperatives in creating lower carbon futures, linking improved forest stewardship to management of wood supply chains, and elevating sustainability performance in building sectors, could real estate development value chains connect the dots to integrate the city into the carbon cycle, embedding wood in the socio-ecological metabolism envisioned by Wood City?

Former WeWork executive, Michael Caton, suggests that engineering and architecture teams can break through old professional delivery models by focusing less on project-based alliances and instead “focus more on claiming ownership of even broader segments of the value chain, stretching downstream toward manufacturing and construction, upstream toward property development and asset management, or both.” ³⁵ According to Caton, architects can gain new expertise since real estate development based approaches “offer architects an invaluable resource long sought in project-based practices: performance feedback on built environments that can be leveraged to improve future outcomes.” ³⁶ Caton predicts that standalone architectural and engineering services firms will be further integrated, if not subsumed, as R&D components into larger value chain organizations controlling prefabrication, real estate development, building design, and other specialized services managing material custody loops.

Like most of the world, 85% of Americans live in low-density metropolitan environments outside of the nation’s top fifty urban cores,³⁷ suggesting that the centrality of future prosperity is tied to urbanization processes in suburban peripheries. Wood City begins with the dilemmas of a perceived “throwaway” culture among ordinary building sectors towards turning low-density metropolitan fabrics into carbon sinks with improved land use. Since the demolition of wood buildings releases carbon back into the atmosphere, longevity in wood buildings is a socio-environmental asset. One day, this public good will likely be monetized. Using mass timber technology, Wood City develops sustainable pattern languages with architectural ambition for these building blocks of America’s low-density metropolitan sprawl. While patterns are aligned with new development trends redefining each building category, each pattern can link up using grammar-like rules to create new placemaking possibilities. Wood City essentially outlines an important yet untapped design market within multiple building sectors requiring greater applied research and the value-adding intelligence of design. Good design is capital.